Stephen King is such a part of the American cultural consciousness that there’s no point in debating his importance anymore: take it as a given and only waste your time if you’re trolling for traffic. But the tired old argument of whether his books are actually any good or not still twitches a limb from time to time and, since I’m a big fan of beating a dead horse, I figured I’d re-read all of Stephen King’s books in order and ask the timeless question: National Treasure or Total Crap?
I loved Stephen King when I was a kid. My gateway drug was a TV broadcast of The Shining caught in snippets when I was way too young, and I remember being hypnotized by the screaming-skull-and-neon-chrome cover of Christine that a friend’s mom was reading. I can’t remember the first book I actually read, but I think it might have been a copy of Different Seasons (or maybe it was Night Shift?) that one of my sisters left behind when she went off to college. The Stephen King bug bit me at just the right time (13) and while a lot of kids measure their childhoods by Harry Potter, mine moved in units of Pet Sematary, Thinner, Skeleton Crew, and It.
And then, for reasons I’m still not quite sure of, I grew out of him. Maybe it was the long string of wobbly books he turned out in the ‘90s. Maybe it was the fact that every time I turned around there seemed to be a new Stephen King book in stores and so I started taking him for granted. Or maybe Stephen King is a writer who’s best appreciated by adolescents. It could be any or all of those reasons. But for some reason he basically slipped my mind for a few decades. And that’s weird because, whether you like him or not, Stephen King is super-important.
King took horror fiction mainstream (Rosemary’s Baby was important but it wasn’t on the cover of TIME magazine), he turned being an author into being a rock star, he helped send horror stratospheric in the ‘80s, and he put Maine on the literary map. He was a tireless advocate for blurring the boundaries between literary and genre fiction (a torch he lit and then passed on to Michael Chabon), and his books have resulted in two major American films (Carrie and The Shining) and a whole host of solid flicks (Stand By Me, Misery, Creepshow, Pet Sematary, The Dead Zone, The Shawshank Redemption).
I started doing this re-read for Tor.com in 2012 because I needed the cash. Tor paid $25/post and if I did four of them in a month that was my grocery money. But something strange happened. When I started doing this re-read I was about to sign a contract to write my first horror novel, Horrorstör. By the time I finished, I had two horror novels under my belt and my non-fiction history of the paperback horror boom of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Paperbacks from Hell, was about to win the Stoker. To say a lot changed in my life over those five years would understate the intensity of that roller coaster ride, but through all the ups and downs, one thing stayed the same: reading big thick books by Stephen King. This re-read that started out as a way to pay the bills became my rock, my anchor and, more than once, my map through rough waters. Looking back, it’s maybe the most important thing I wrote in that time.
I didn’t read everything Stephen King wrote. I left out the books he wrote under the psuedonym, Richard Bachman (Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man), except for Thinner since it was essentially released as a Stephen King book when his pen name was exposed right after publication. I ignored his illustrated books and comic books (Cycle of the Werewolf, Creepshow), the seven volume Dark Tower books, his book of essays about horror (Danse Macabre), and his collaborations with Peter Straub (The Talisman, Black House).
That still left me with plenty of books. 38 of his novels, to be exact, along with 15 novellas, 111 short stories, and 5 poems. In the years since the re-read ended, he’s written a ton of new novels and two more collection of short stories, and shows no sign of slowing down. One day, I’ll catch up to him, but that’s the nice thing about reading King. He’s the rare author who writes more than you can ever possibly read. He’s one of the rare writers who believes in always giving you more.